Google Bard gains advanced logic & reasoning skills

Google is pushing a new update to its generative AI tool Bard, improving its logic and reasoning skills. This update makes the service better at mathematical tasks, coding questions, and string manipulation. Bard is also getting support for exporting tables to Google Sheets.

Google developed a new technique to improve Bard’s logic skills

In March, Google incorporated PaLM (Pathways Language Model) into Bard for improved math and logic capabilities. The company said that it would continue to develop advanced logic skills for the AI tool in the coming months. As promised, it has now updated the service with capabilities for solving complex mathematical tasks and coding questions.

According to Google, a new technique called “implicit code execution” helps Bard detect computational prompts. In response, it runs code in the background to solve the question and give you accurate answers (it may get things wrong occasionally). With this update, Bard can detect and solve computational and logical prompts like:

• The angle of elevation of the top of a building from the foot of the tower is 30 degrees and the angle of elevation of the top of the tower from the foot of the building is 60 degrees. If the tower is 50m high, find the height of the building.
• A is older than B. C is older than B but younger than A. D is younger than E and B. B is older than E. If they sit in the increasing order of their age, who is in the middle?

Google says Bard’s improved logic and reasoning skills rely on a combination of large language models (LLMs) and traditional code. The method has improved the accuracy of Bard’s responses to computation-based word and math problems by about 30 percent. The AI tool may not always get it right, but it is getting better at such problems.

Bard now lets you export tables to Google Sheets

This update for Bard comes just a few days after Google added precise location support to the service. That addition followed a host of updates in May, including the ability to export content to Google Docs and Gmail complete with formatting. It’s now gaining support for Google Sheets export as well. If you prompted Bard to generate a table for some data, or it automatically responded with a table for your question, you can export that table to Google Sheets.

Google will likely push several more updates to Bard in the coming weeks. It is working on a host of new features for the AI tool, including chat history, refining responses according to specific tones, file uploading support, and text-to-speech. We will let you know when the company rolls out these features to Bard.